Certain communication services may be offered to the subscribers of a given communication network according to “product offerings.” For example, mobile broadband connectivity may be offered to individual subscribers of a cellular or other wireless or wired communication network in defined blocks of time, e.g., hourly. Additionally, or alternatively, the product offering may be based on discrete blocks of data transfer amounts.
In a known approach, such products are pre-provisioned in a subscriber database responsive to subscriber input, e.g., pre-purchases through a web portal, or they are pre-provisioned based on scheduled or automatic processing running within the communication network. Because usage of a product-related service is authorized for a given subscriber based on there being related products already provisioned for that subscriber, the network operator is obliged to pre-provision and store potentially large numbers of products in its subscriber database.
For example, for a mobile broadband service having a product offering in which connectivity is provided in one-hour increments, the network operator might, for each subscriber that is eligible for the service, provision twenty-four products to cover the next twenty-four hour usage period. Each such product corresponds to a specific one of the hours and is tied to a corresponding one of the eligible subscribers. Similarly, the network operator may make a product offering in which subscribers are allowed 1 GB of data transfer per month, where usage is assessed in 25 MB increments. For each such subscriber, the network operator would, in an example approach to pre-provisioning, provision forty 25 MB products at a minimum, to cover the monthly product offering. In this context, a 25 MB product will be understood as a record that covers or authorizes up to 25 MB in data transfer by a given subscriber.
With this approach, all the subscribers that have signed up for a given offer have to have their corresponding products available for authorizing actual service usage and all such products must be stored in advance in the subscriber database. Product storage quickly becomes burdensome. In the 24-hour and/or monthly data transfer product offering described above, the network operator would generate from twenty-four to forty products per subscriber, depending on which product offering the subscriber selected. Example numbers of 600,000 subscribers and fifty bytes of storage required per product imply storage requirements of 720 MB to 1.2 GB for the pre-provisioned products. That amount of data is prohibitive, particularly because of the way subscriber databases are used in real-time within the network charging systems.